Duke Elegant
Joined: Nov 28, 2002
Posts: 263 Posted: 2003-05-20 21:09
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I got a call from my daughter in Montreal today and she had just come back from Maine.
That reminded me of an experience I will never forget. Just a quick one folks.
In 1975/76 we used to fly nine Grumman Avengers from BC to New Brunswick to spray for the budworm infestation. WOW! What fun. Nine Avengers, in three groups of three... can you imagine the trouble we got into across Canada. My engineer flew in the back seat and his stuff was stowed in the belly, including his target shooting .22. We had parachutes upon which we sat as part of our seat... and boy!... after four hours they felt as if they were full of deer antlers.
That same year was the year that a D.B. Cooper had hijacked a 727, grabbed about a million in cash, got the crew to lower the rear door and parachuted to earth somewhere over Oregon if memory serves me correctly. He was never located, nor the booty.
Well, we got to New Brunswick and Conair had a rental vehicle for us and we unloaded our gear and got ready for spraying....by the way... we carried 650US gallons of insecticide... heavy, to say the least. But the bugs hadn't crawled out yet so we had some time off. "Let's go to Calais, Maine, and get **** faced".... so we did.... or so we thought.
Six of us crammed into the Buick and pulled up to the US border. We were all competing for loudmouth of the month so the US customs were not impressed.
"Open your trunk!" grunts this Billy but we knew no fear... we hadn't done anything.
Well, it turns out that my engineer had his chute in the trunk along with his rifle. He was not with us.
They were looking for D.B. Cooper. They were sure they had him... or us... didn't matter.
Up against the wall we went till the FBI showed up. It sure didn't help with us calling them morons.
We did talk (babble) our way out of it and as an interesting side-note to this I believe that 727's were modified so that the door could not be deployed in flight.
They call it the D.B Cooper switch... could someone elaborate on this?
[ This Message was edited by: Duke Elegant on 2003-05-20 21:15 ]
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